


blues fallin' down like hail

by OldShrewsburyian



Category: Timeless (TV 2016)
Genre: Black Male Character, Blues, Dialogue Heavy, Drinking, Drinking & Talking, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Introspection, Male Friendship, Melancholy, Music, References to Shakespeare, Shakespeare Quotations, Time Travel, Whiskey & Scotch, oh the blues is an achin' old heart disease
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-16
Updated: 2019-10-16
Packaged: 2020-12-17 16:49:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,598
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21057728
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OldShrewsburyian/pseuds/OldShrewsburyian
Summary: A soundtrack for this fic can be found here:https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLfDa9Bkli2bjUDriYndt26bjDKCMKrtf-I think I owe the idea of Lorena as an NGO worker to @extasiswings. I've seen the idea of her working for an organization like the Red Cross (though I've taken another as my prototype) floating around.





	blues fallin' down like hail

_Mmmm, the sun goin' down boy, dark goin' catch me here_

Connor Mason sits alone. Somehow, the common area seems less empty than his solitary room. He has brought the phonograph — and, of course, the whisky. From here, he can watch the Lifeboat. From here, he can imagine that one day, Rufus will step through the door. From here, he can wonder at the choices that have brought him here, and wonder if there are any actions that can get them out.

_I got to keep movin', I got to keep movin'_  
_Blues fallin' down like hail, blues fallin' down like hail_  
_Hmmm-mmm, blues fallin' down like hail, blues fallin' down like hail_  
_And the days keeps on worryin' me_  
_There's a hellhound on my trail_

What is most surprising to him, in recalling Robert Johnson — besides the astonishing fact itself — is the light of the man, the strange and visionary hope that animated him, behind and beyond the exhaustion of long injustice. What would it mean, Connor wonders, to have that kind of courage? Is it something found, or something forged?

He is half-dozing, brooding over the shine of amber in his glass, when he hears the footfall behind him. He turns to find perhaps the only person before whom he feels unashamed.

“Flynn,” he says, after a few minutes, simply because it is disconcerting to be unacknowledged (he does not believe in the least that he is unobserved.)

“Mason.” The other man has taken a seat at the table, without commentary, without visible reaction to finding a mad blues man on the phonograph and a mad inventor brooding over his creation. Connor glances at the pale lights of the clock over the oven. Philosophizing at this hour never comes to good. _When your lonely heart has learned its lesson…_ But what lessons are there to be learned, when time itself bends before you, and the only constant is still loss?

_And the blues fell, mama's child_  
_Tore me all upside-down_  
_Blues fell, mama's child_  
_And it tore me all upside down_

Connor glances over at Flynn. He has poured himself a glass of water, and positioned it at the extreme edge of the table. In front of him is a volume that smells of dust. He turns pages regularly; only occasionally does he make a note on the pad at his elbow, writing in quick, even strokes.

_The blues_  
_Is a low-down shakin' chill_  
_Yes, preach 'em now_  
_Mmmmm-mmmmm_  
_Is a low-down shakin' chill_

Connor pushes himself up off the couch, gets another tumbler out of the cupboard, the bottle dangling easily from one hand, a familiar weight. “That,” he says, “looks like the kind of work that goes better with whisky.”

Flynn looks up as Connor pours the Dewar’s. “Thanks.” His gaze is almost unnervingly steady; Connor has the uneasy feeling that Flynn is appraising him, with compassion and without a shred of pity.

Connor clears his throat, but can think of nothing to say. He nods, and touches his glass to Flynn’s, and takes the opposite seat at the table.

_I'm a drunken hearted man_  
_My life seems so misery_  
_I'm a drunken hearted man_  
_My life seems so misery_  
_And if I could change my way of livin'_  
_It would mean so much to me_

There are times in his life, Connor thinks, when he has been entirely unworthy of Robert Johnson. He clears his throat again. “German,” he observes.

“Lucy doesn’t read it.”

“Late hours for it,” suggests Connor. 

Flynn glances up, smiles slowly. “I don’t sleep; didn’t they tell you?”

“Well,” says Connor, eyeing the level in the bottle, “no more do I, these days. And no, they didn’t. They never did turn you into a boogey-man, you know.” This time the strange, light eyes are startled. “Despite Rittenhouse’s worst efforts. Our worst efforts.” 

Flynn picks up the glass of whisky, shakes his head as though to dismiss that attempt at self-condemnation. At a more coherent hour, Connor thinks, he might have found something to counter the other man’s dismissal. But not now. Now there is only the shared whisky, the shared silence, the wailing of the blues.

_I been dogged and I been driven  
Ever since I left my mother's home_

Connor wonders what it would take to bring Rufus back. He wonders what Rufus will say to him, if (if, _if_) they get him back. He wonders what he will say to Rufus’ family if they don’t. He had spent so much time telling Rufus the truth that he was extraordinary, that he was anything but expendable… so much, and yet not nearly enough.

_My father died and left me_  
_My poor mother done the best that she could_  
_My father died and left me_  
_My poor mother done the best she could_  
_Every man like that game you call love_  
_But it don't mean no man no good_

“Do you think we’ll get them back?” He has asked the question before he is aware of formulating it. Flynn breathes in sharply, as if struck. Exhaling, he knocks back the remainder of the whisky in his glass.

“I don’t know.”

“No.” Connor refills his glass, decides it would be unwise to refill his own.

“Lucy still had hope,” Flynn says, “at the beginning.” Briefly, wanly, he smiles. “I mean: when the beginning was for me. And then, she was radiant with hope. When she and Wyatt came… at least she still had resolve.”

“Hm. ‘There is a tide in the affairs of men…’ Do you suppose we’ve missed it?”

“Bound in shallows and in miseries? I hope not.”

Connor raises his head sharply. “I didn’t know you knew _Julius Caesar._”

Flynn tilts his head in a half-nod: an ambiguous gesture. After a long silence: “Lear,” he says. “‘The… the lamentable change is from the best. The worst returns to laughter.’”

Connor sips his whisky. “I am both impressed and deeply disturbed that you are quoting _King Lear_ as an argument for relative optimism. Successfully.” 

"Ah well," says Flynn philosophically. Again silence falls between them, and Robert Johnson sings the “Kind-Hearted Woman Blues.”

_I love my baby, my baby don't love me_  
_I love my baby, my baby don't love me_  
_But I really love that woman, can't stand to leave her be_  


“Are you, by the way — ” Connor is very careful to enunciate — “at all aware of how you say her name?”

Flynn does not move. He meets Connor’s eyes unblinking, and only his breathing quickens. “What,” he says eventually, “are you implying?”

“Oh!” Connor attempts an airy wave with the glass; the whisky climbs its sides, and only just comes short of its lip. “Don’t know that I’m implying anything. Merely… observing.”

Flynn pushes his tumbler across the table.

“Fair enough.” Connor pours three fingers. “ ’S funny. He sings about love all the time — Johnson — love and desire. It’s never an easy thing. Never a _happy_ thing; the furthest thing from it, often. Just… honest.”

“Mm.” Flynn adjusts the angle of his chair, stretches his legs out in front of him. “ ’S what she was,” he says, “Lorena. Honest.”

Connor hums softly, aware of the fragility of the confidence.

_I been drinking tears for water trying to make it home_

“She showed up,” continues Flynn, “with her hair bundled under a scarf and a — an NGO badge that wasn’t even faded. And she was… she was so cheerful that I thought she couldn’t possibly…”

“Understand reality,” finishes Connor. “That indestructible joy. Rufus kept some of it. Remarkable.”

“Yes. Well.” Flynn swirls the liquid in his glass. “I went up to her and she — there was a tendril of hair clinging to the back of her neck — she… Well. I was irritated and exhausted and a damn fool, and I said: ‘You must know it isn’t safe.’ And she said: ‘Who said I came here to be safe?’ And her smile was radiant, and her hair was golden under her scarf, and God help me, I think I fell a little in love with her even then.”

_I been drinking tears for water trying to make it home_

“There’s something infectious,” suggests Connor, “about that kind of hope.”

“Yes.”

“And here we are,” says Connor, and refills their glasses.

“Yes,” says Flynn again.

“I don’t ask for much,” says Connor, gesturing with the whisky. “I just… I just… like to see him settled. Never thought about children, myself.” Seeing Flynn’s expression, he continues rather hastily: “But Rufus. He’s… rare person. Rare sort of person. Rare sort of trust. Not sure I ever deserved it.”

“We can’t earn that kind of trust,” says Flynn promptly, and with surprising precision of consonants. “We can only… hope not to betray it.” He finishes rather too much of his whisky at one go. “And we will betray it. Almost as a certainty.”

_You may bury my body_  
_Down by the highway side_  
_I don't care where you bury my body when I'm dead and gone_  
_You may bury my body, oh…_

“ ’M starting to think,” says Connor, “that you shouldn’t drink alone.”

“You’ll notice that I’m not.”

“Well. Shouldn’t… shouldn’t… shouldn’t not sleep alone. Somniac. Shouldn’t be’n insomniac alone.”

“Thank you,” says Flynn gravely.

“Don’t mention it.”

“No help for it,” says Flynn, and finishes his glass as he rises to his feet. “Just… keep trying to do it.”

The awareness is dawning on Connor that he is, in fact, quite drunk. “Trying to do what?”

Flynn smiles, and stretches out a hand to help him up. “To save the people we love.”

**Author's Note:**

> A soundtrack for this fic can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLfDa9Bkli2bjUDriYndt26bjDKCMKrtf-
> 
> I think I owe the idea of Lorena as an NGO worker to @extasiswings. I've seen the idea of her working for an organization like the Red Cross (though I've taken another as my prototype) floating around.


End file.
